- [Instructor] You may be wondering,
how do I approach my research project?
Well, while there's no real industry standard
nor prearranged process
for approaching a qualitative research project,
there are some known strategies and steps you can take
as you start new projects here in NVivo.
In this course,
we're going to use a scenario where we work
in the marketing department of a large,
international hotel chain, Landon Hotels,
and we need to conduct some qualitative research
to really get to know our customers,
not just know about them.
Let's take a look at a typical path you might take
when exploring a particular theme in a new research project.
First, we have import.
Let's say we sent out some surveys and they've come back,
and they contained a number of open questions
where the respondents could type in paragraphs of text
if they wanted to.
Next is explore where you'd open up those surveys
and explore the responses.
Then it's time to code.
Maybe some people wrote about cleanliness.
You might make a theme note called cleanliness
to collect all such references.
Next is query.
You might run a query of all your important content
looking for words like clean, dirty, and room
to see if others are writing about this too.
Now, it's time to reflect.
Here's where you gather the query results
in your cleanliness node to review all the material
in one place.
Next up is the visualization step
where you might create a word tree, for example,
to see how people are talking about cleanliness.
The last step is the memo step
where you jot down your insights to be used later
when you write up your project reports.
And we're back to the beginning
where you would repeat the process,
making more and more notes in the coding step.
This is where your analytical expertise comes in to play
and NVivo is simply there to help you with the gathering,
organizing, managing, and exploration of your data
to find patterns and themes.
Remember, there are no set rules
for how you should approach your research projects,
but it can help to understand
that qualitative research is an iterative process
and similar versions of the approach
or path we just examined could be used over and over again
to generate a limitless number of outcomes.
All right, it's time to launch NVivo and get familiar
with the user interface and we'll do that next.